http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
BY THE SHORES of the Potomac, near the shining big-sea water, will stand
the contentious wigwam of the Smithsonian -- its National Museum of the
American Indian, to be precise.

Last week, while the Senate was cutting funding for the Brooklyn Museum of
Art for its painting of a feces-smeared Virgin Mary, a more far-reaching
assault on American values went largely unnoticed.

Construction was begun on the Smithsonian's Indian museum on the Mall in
Washington, D.C. The $110-million project (two-thirds taxpayer funded) is
expected to attract 6 million visitors a year.

A New York Times story on the ground-breaking ceremony provided a glimpse
of political correctness to come. The Times noted that the museum "will not
only celebrate and display continuing tribal cultures but work to
set the record straight."

The museum's director, Richard West, said the institution would be
dedicated to "presenting the Indian perspective." By "Indian perspective,"
West means the fulminations of activists who think Columbus was the father
of genocide and the 7th Cavalry was the S.S. on horseback.

To emphasize the point, those attending the ceremony sang the anthem of the
American Indian Movement, a militant gang best known for its terrorist
action at the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1975, which left two FBI agents
dead.

The Smithsonian has passionately embraced the multiculturalist agenda. It
sees all of history in the reflected light of the PC trinity -- race, gender
and class.

This dogmatism was most conspicuous in a 1995 exhibit on the end of World
War II in the Pacific and the Hiroshima bombing. The exhibit's original
script (revised after protests by veterans) described the conflict as "a war
of revenge against the Japanese," who were "fighting to preserve their
culture against imperialism."

It was as if the rape of Nanking, Pearl Harbor, the Bataan Death March,
"comfort women" and other atrocities by the Imperial Army had never
happened.

Even art isn't safe from the Smithsonian's revisionists. A 1991 exhibit
("The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820-1920")
was described by a writer for The Washington Post as "reducing the saga of
America's Western pioneers to little more than victimization,
disillusionment and environmental rape."

Scientists complained that the exhibit "Science in American Life" could
have been scripted by the Unabomber. Joan Shields, a professor of chemistry
at Long Island University, called it a "revisionist historical display of
science as a litany of moral debacles, environmental catastrophes, social
injustices and destruction by radiation."

The Smithsonian's latest rewriting of history is its book "Timelines of the
Ancient World -- A Visual Chronology From the Origins of Life to A.D. 1500."
While major events in the development of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam are
meticulously detailed, the book moves from B.C. to A.D. without
acknowledging the birth of Jesus. The spiritual revolution wrought by the
Jewish people is similarly ignored.

The Smithsonian was established in 1846 for the "increase and diffusion of
knowledge among men." Today, it exists to exhort.

At the Smithsonian, history becomes a self-criticism session, where the
sins of the West, evils of capitalism and the toxicity of the
Judeo-Christian tradition are confessed and atoned.

Shortly, the Smithsonian will take to the warpath again. Its National
Museum of the American Indian will attack the legitimacy of our founding and
Westward expansion. From Plymouth Rock to the closing of the frontier, it
will present the "Indian perspective." But you'll get to pay for it.

The complex story of America's native cultures should be told without bias
or belligerence. Instead, the museum will subject visitors to a sanitized,
one-sided history and victim-group mythology.

Will this effort to "set the record straight" include celebrations of
ritual cannibalism practiced by the Mohawks and Chippewas, torture
techniques perfected by the Apaches, the quaint custom of scalping or the
degraded status of women in most Indian tribes?

America may be the only nation in history to subsidize its own destruction.
When the multiculturalists, academic Marxists, perpetually aggrieved
minorities and sensitivity gestapo finally succeed in pulling down our
national house, over the ruins should be erected a sign reading, "Your Tax
Dollars At
Work."